Hotel Guests Crave Free Wi-Fi according to the LA Times

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According to a survey by J.D. Power & Associates, free Wi-Fi is now the most important thing for hotel guests in nearly every segment of hotels.  The LA Times reported on the results in the article found here.  From the article:

Of guests staying at mid-scale hotels, 96% said they got free Wi-Fi, as did 64% of guests at budget hotels, according to the survey of guests who stayed in hotels from May 2009 to June 2010. None who stayed in luxury hotels said they got free wireless Internet.

We are surprised that 96 percent of guests in mid-scale hotels are now getting free Wi-Fi.  The free Wi-Fi spread at an incredible pace.  We are not surprised that no guests reported free Wi-Fi in luxury hotels.  Free Wi-Fi is a selling tool and makes little difference at a luxury hotel.  From the article:

At the Ritz-Carlton luxury hotel chain, the fee for Wi-Fi access is a top complaint among guests, said Ritz-Carlton spokeswoman Vivian A. Deuschl.  Although some Ritz-Carlton hotels offer free Internet access in the lobbies and other public spaces, the hotel chain based in Maryland will continue to charge for the service in guest rooms, she said.

We are actually surprised by the lack of wireless internet in guest rooms or the poor quality of wireless internet in guest rooms.  Many hotels still offer wired internet only.  Not having Wi-Fi will actually cost you business.  Many guests now travel with Wi-Fi-only devices, such as the very popular iPad.  In fact, this holiday shopping season, we are going to see more tablet computers from almost every manufacturer.  By next year, you will see many, many guests with Wi-Fi only tablet computers in your restaurant.

Hotel Revenue From Phone Calls, In-Room Movies Drying Up according to the LA Times

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The LA Times reported that hotel revenue from phone calls and in-room movies is drying up.  Not exactly shocking, but the details are pretty interesting.  From the article:

Annual revenue collected by U.S. hotels from phone calls dropped to an average of $178 per room in 2009 from $1,252 in 1999, a decline of 86%, according to Colliers PKF Hospitality Research.

The phone revenue decrease is a reminder to us of the good old days of outrageous phone charges and the guest complaints that went along with them.  It is hard to believe that only 10 years ago, hotels charged $5 a minute for long-distance calls.  Most hotels even charged 25 cents a minute for toll-free calls to capture some revenue from guests who used calling cards.  Phone revenues are now down 86 percent to about $.65 per room night.

Meanwhile, income from in-room movies and games dropped to $126 per room from $171, a decline of 26%, according to the research firm.

In-room movies have fared much better and only declined 26 percent.  This small decrease is somewhat surprising considering how far technology has come in the last decade.  Guests now travel with laptops and have access to high-speed internet everywhere.  Guests can watch DVDs are stream movies from services such as Netflix.  Laptops now even have an HDMI port so you can plug them directly into a television.  From the article:

In fact, by embracing the technology that guests demand, such as free Internet access, free computer applications and docking stations for iPod media players, hotels have cut off potential revenue sources. According to a recent survey by J.D. Power & Associates, 55% of U.S. hotels offer online access at no charge.

Technology will continue to eat away at hotel profits.  The traveler is more tech savvy and more connected than ever.  We are going to have to continue to search for new revenue streams.

This Bedbug Registry Will Make You Itch

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The USA Today posted a good article on the rising incidents of bedbugs in the US.  You can check out the full article here.  The article links to a website, bedbugregistry.com, where over 20,000 travelers have posted their stories of their bedbug encounters.  The database has hotels from shady roadside inns… to some of the top hotels in the country.

We took a look at the hotels in Southern California and were surprised to see many top brands on the list… and many with multiple reports.  Bedbugs are a fact of life in the hotel industry.  Just like any other complaint, handling the problem properly will usually keep you away from this type of bad publicity.

Hilton to close California call center, cut 300 jobs according to USA Today

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USA Today’s travel blog ‘Hotel Check-in’ is reporting that Hilton is going to be closing the reservation call center in Hemet, California and moving the call center to the Philippines.  Unfortunately, over 300 jobs will be eliminated in Hemet.  From the USA Today article:

Blue Hilton logo featuring a stylized “H” inside an oval swirl above the word “Hilton” in bold, blue letters on a white background.“Hilton previously closed call centers in Illinois in 2008 and Pennsylvania last year, according to the Press-Enterprise. Some of the Pennsylvania workers had said they, too, went to the Philippines to train call-center workers, the paper says.

Hilton will offer employees positions at Hilton’s call centers in Carrollton, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., where workers make roughly $9 an hour, the story says. Those who don’t take the jobs will be offered severance packages.

Further details about the layoff aren’t available, because the employees told the paper that Hilton ordered them not to talk to the media – or, if they did, they’d lose their severance pay.”

Be sure to check out the full article by hitting the link above.  Warning:  there are a few hundred posts from very angry American’s following the article.  Here is a follow up article regarding the reader’s comments.

USA Today: Hotel Guests More Satisfied During Downturn According to J.D. Power

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The image shows the USA TODAY logo with bold white letters on a blue background and a circular striped graphic to the left of the word USA.According to the Hotel Check-in section of USA Today, guests are more satisfied with hotels during the downturn.  You can read the entire article and some pretty insightful comments here.  From the article:

“Hotel guests have generally been happier with their hotel experience in the past 12 months vs. the prior year as room rates dropped and crowds thinned, according to J.D. Power and Assoc.’s latest study that measures how well hotel chains satisfy their customers.”

The reasons for increased satisfaction according to the article:

“The travel downturn: With fewer people on the road, people who did travel found emptier hotels, which meant they encountered less competition for the treadmill in the fitness center, or less of a chance to stand in line at a busy convention hotel.”

“Cost: Hotel rates fell in the last 12 months, and customers generally felt more satisfied with what they received for their money.”

“Hotels operations: Hotels genuinely got better at pleasing their customers in the past year due to stiff competition for guests. “All of them are focused on improving guest satisfaction,” Schwartz says. Almost all of the chains increased their scores on a year-over-year basis – and not a single hotel chain saw its score drop significantly, he says.”

Our take:  It is somewhat surprising to see increased satisfaction as we are all battling with being understaffed.  Most hotels that we talk with have similar or higher occupancy but have much lower staffing levels because the ADRs are so low.  We believe that much of it comes down to cost.  Many guests are more satisfied simply because the rooms cost less and there is much more perceived value.

The Ultimate Arrival Experience in Action

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If you are working hard on improving your guest welcome with our Guide to the Ultimate Arrival Experience, we wanted to share a few stories of the Ultimate Arrival Experience in action.  The great thing about these two stories is how they show how our Ultimate Arrival Experience will work for any hotel.  These two hotels were both visited by one of our mystery shoppers during the same week…  both took a similar approach to the arrival experience… but are very different hotels.  The first hotel was a budget-friendly Holiday Inn, the second was an ultra-luxurious Ritz-Carlton.

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Hospitality Jobs are the 7th Worst Jobs for Workers with College Degrees, According to Yahoo Jobs

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Yahoo! HotJobs logo with white text on a purple background. Yahoo! is on the left with an exclamation mark, and hotjobs is on the right, featuring a small sunburst symbol as the o in hotjobs.Yahoo Jobs released their 10 lowest-paying jobs for workers with college degrees.  The study, found here, compares the salaries of workers in the middle of their careers.  Hospitality and tourism jobs have a starting salary of $37,000 and a mid-career salary of $54,300.  The worst paying jobs on the list also include drama, fine arts, education, horticulture, Spanish, music, theology, elementary education, and social work.

Consumer Reports Rates Hotels, Results May Surprise You

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Logo for Consumer Reports featuring the words Consumer Reports in bold black letters on a white background. The o in Consumer is red and stands out from the rest of the text.In the June 2010 issue of Consumer Reports, they have a special travel section that tells readers how to get great deals on travel.  They also announce their ratings for the year.  The hotel ratings, based on over 27,000 reader’s surveys, are somewhat surprising.  Consumer Reports has odd categories of hotels such as ‘fanciest’, ‘luxury’, and ‘upscale’.  The ‘upscale’ category for instance has both full-service and limited-service hotels.

The top score was a tie between Ritz-Carlton in the ‘fanciest’ category and Homewood Suites in the ‘upscale’ category.  The Homewood Suites scored an excellent in value and the Ritz scored very good.

Here are the rankings for a couple of the categories:

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How Google’s Real-Time Search Can Help You Save Customers

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We have posted a few articles on how to successfully maintain your internet reputation.  If you missed them, start by reading this one.  Maintaining your hotel’s internet reputation is one of the most important things you can do to save customers who had a bad experience and capture new customers. 

Google has now started to do ‘Real-Time Searches’.  What does that mean?  Google says real-time search is:

The image shows the Google logo with the company name spelled in colorful, stylized letters: blue G, red o, yellow o, blue g, green l, and red e on a white background.“… new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”

What does that mean to you?  Well, for starters, your hotel will now appear in Google if people post a tweet on Twitter about you or mention you in their Facebook status update.  This can be either really good for you, or really bad for you.  Here is how I first noticed Google’s real-time search.  I was going to go out to a local restaurant and needed the address so I did what I always do… pulled out the iPhone and googled it.  I found the address on the first Google entry.  I happened to scroll down to the bottom of the page and saw someone’s Twitter tweet that said ‘got food poisoning at XYZ Restaurant’. 

Obviously not good for business.  I know that I found another restaurant to eat at.  I am sure that many others did as well.  So, what should you do?  First, have a good plan in place to monitor your hotel’s internet reputation.  Then act on anything both positive and negative that you may see.  It is very easy to contact someone who posts about your hotel on Twitter or Facebook or in their Blog.  Be sure to send them a thank you if they say something positive about you and make sure that you offer to fix any problems they may have had if they say anything negative about you.  Make sure that you have a plan in place today!

USA Today reports ‘Hard Times Send Hotel Industry into Survival Mode’

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The image shows the USA TODAY logo with bold white letters on a blue background and a circular striped graphic to the left of the word USA.A really good article from USA Today about hotels struggling to survive.  Check out the full article on USA Today’s website.

The article features some high-profile hotel closures such as the W Hotel in San Diego and the Ritz-Carlton in Las Vegas.  The article also mentions how 76 California hotels have already fallen into foreclosure and that 330 out of the states 10,000 hotels have defaulted on their mortgage payments in the last year.

As far as the cuts, the article really only mentions that Concierges are being replaced by lower-cost employees and some hotels are changing their approach to food and beverage.

We have noticed quite a few changes at hotels over the last year or so to cut costs or drive revenues.  A few of the changes we see:

  • Many hotels have closed restaurants and bars.  Instead of having 2 or 3, many have closed all but one restaurant and one bar.
  • Hotels have cut costs and gone green by eliminating newspapers and printed folios.
  • Parking rates are on the rise.  Many hotels have increased the parking fees for both self-parking and valet parking.
  • Breakfast buffets have really been changing.  The prices have increased and the quality and selection of food have decreased.
  • Overall staffing has really decreased.  Many hotels have eliminated positions like bellmen or concierges.  Also, we see longer lines at check-in because the hotels have fewer GSAs with similar occupancy as in the past.

What are you doing to survive?  Please post in our comment section!